By Joshua Moran
Eastern Virginia Medical School
The COVID-19 pandemic has been tragic and challenging. Academic psychiatry has not been immune to the increased workload felt across our state. Additionally, educators and trainees have both been adapting to the new frontier of virtual learning. While educators and residents assume increasing responsibility, commitment to psychiatric education remains paramount to the future of mental health in Virginia.
With this pandemic, many attending faculty have increased clinic responsibilities, while juggling vital teaching responsibilities. Maintaining comprehensive didactic curriculum has become increasingly difficult. Recent publications have shown that learners (on the medical student level) both value and perform equally well when given virtual lectures (compared to face-to-face lectures)1. To balance faculty workload and lecture quality, Shah et al. studied inter-institutional (VCU and MedStart Georgetown) lecture sharing. Shah et al. found that didactics between institutions allowed faculty to strengthen “areas of weakness” in curriculum and easily (and affordably) share education to a larger audience2. To our knowledge, no graduate medical education institution has, to date, studied the effects of coupling virtual learning to the inter-institutional didactic sharing.
Eastern Virginia Medical School, Hampton Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and Portsmouth Naval Medical Center are collaborating to innovate a virtual visiting lectureship in partnership with the Psychiatry Society of Virginia (PSV). We invite community and academic psychiatrists from across the state to help create 30-minute recorded zoom lectures to be viewed from the PSV member portal. These visiting, virtual lecturers will have the opportunity to share their clinical acumen in a time-efficient manner. Residents and residency programs will benefit from supplementing their didactic education with these pre-recorded lessons. To help us evolve and improve the virtual lectureship in real-time, we will ask that residents complete a brief, anonymous online survey before and after participating in the e-learning lecture. Likewise, lecturers will be asked to also complete a similar, brief post-survey about their experience with virtual teaching.
Despite the struggles of these past years, we hope that this initiative will better connect trainees and physicians across Virginia, while streamlining and expanding the influence of our experienced and diverse psychiatrists.
Please, share interest, questions, or concerns with Joshua Moran at [email protected]. Thank you for your interest in enhancing the quality and accessibility of psychiatric education in Virginia.
- Rossettini G, Geri T, Turolla A, et al. Online teaching in physiotherapy education during COVID-19 pandemic in Italy: a retrospective case-control study on students’ satisfaction and performance. BMC Med Educ. 2021; 21(1): 456. doi: 10.1186/s12909-021-02896-1.
- Shah BA, Jeon JY, Crane EP, et al. Collaboration, Collegiality, and Sharing of Resources: Benefits of a Visiting Professor Exchange Program in Breast Imaging. J. Breast Imaging. 2020; 2 (5): 492-500. https://doi.org/10.1093/jbi/wbaa045
